The embodiments disclosed hereinafter generally relate to systems and methods for providing a flight plan with or without environmental information to a user. More particularly, the disclosed embodiments relate systems and methods for providing a flight plan with or without environmental information to a user in response to receipt of current flight information.
Environmental information is used during planning and execution of flight operations. Planning flight operations result in the creation of flight plans. Flight plans are used to document basic information such as departure and arrival points, estimated time en route, various waypoints the aircraft must traverse en route, information pertaining to those waypoints, such as actual or estimated altitude and speed of the aircraft at those waypoints, information relating to legs of the flight between those waypoints, and aircraft predicted performance. This type of flight plan may be used to construct a flight trajectory including the various legs of the flight, which are connected to the various waypoints along the route. This flight trajectory may include a lateral trajectory defined in the horizontal plane and a vertical trajectory defined in the vertical plane. The flight trajectory may also include the element of time across the horizontal and vertical planes.
Environmental information for the route between the departure gate and arrival gate, including information about forecasted and in-situ weather for the various waypoints along the route, may affect a flight trajectory. For example, if incorrect weather is forecasted for a particular waypoint along the route of the flight plan, certain predictions for the flight path may become inaccurate, such as speed, fuel consumption, and time en route.
Additionally, revision of a flight plan may include deleting or adding waypoints, modifying the position of waypoints, or modifying the characteristics pertaining to the waypoints or legs between the waypoints, such as aircraft speed, time of arrival at the waypoint, or altitude. The characteristics for various waypoints or legs between waypoints may further include weather bands. A weather band is a collection of environmental information for a specific spatial point, such as a specific altitude or a specific three- or four-dimensional point in space. Environmental information may include but is not limited to factors such as temperature, pressure, noise, air particulates, humidity, turbulence, wind speed, and wind direction.
Ground operation centers may identify and send weather bands to an aircraft for use in determining how weather may affect flight trajectory calculations. The weather bands identified may be based on current or predicted weather, flight predictions, flight intent or flight plans, or may be default weather bands non-specific to a particular flight trajectory. Actual weather may impact a predicted flight trajectory if the actual weather differs from the predicted weather used to calculate the predicted flight trajectory. Additionally, different factors en route may cause an aircrew to modify the flight plan, and the environmental information from the ground operation center, loaded during preflight, may no longer be accurate or up-to-date for the modified flight plan. Inaccurate or dated environmental information can result in inefficiencies for flight operations, such as an increase in fuel consumption and emissions or delay in flight time, for example.
It is known for an aircraft to request a new flight plan and/or new environmental information from a ground-based operations center or air traffic controller. The downlinked request may be accompanied or followed by current flight route or flight plan information for that aircraft. The downlinked flight route or flight plan information may consist of such items as: a list of waypoints, instrument departure procedures, arrival and departure transitions, airways, Standard Terminal Arrival Routes, fixes and leg types.
More generally, flight information can be received from either a ground source or from an aircraft in the form of a flight message. From a ground source, there is no current solution to decode and translate the flight message into a flight plan type of format because each ground source may specify its own unique format and encryption. For flight messages downlinked from an aircraft, there is a known software tool that can be used to parse the flight message, but nothing to decode and translate the flight message. For the uplink, there are no solutions to translate and encode a list of waypoints and other flight information representing a flight plan/route with or without environmental information.
There is a need for systems and methods for decoding and translating a received flight plan or route and, thereafter, translating and encoding a trajectory or flight plan/route with or without selected environmental information into an outgoing (e.g., uplinked) message for transmission to users. There is a need for systems and methods to be adaptive to multiple variations of incoming and outgoing flight plan/route formats.